When I was first diagnosed with diabetes, I was super confused. I had needle phobia, and the thought of having to inject myself made me ill. You quickly have to get over that if you want to live. The other thing was food. I would never again eat a meal without counting carbs and injecting…
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Today I woke up with an astronomical blood sugar of 16 mmol/l (288 mg/dl). I haven’t been at that level since Christmas when I got drunk and ate a loaf of banana bread. What did I do this time? Well, I had half a bag of crisps. And some peanuts. And a little more cheese…
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We speculate on the causes of the obesity epidemic. At first glance, easy access to delicious food everywhere you go definitely has something to do with it. But there’s more to it. The Carbohydrate-Insulin Model is interesting from a biochemistry point of view. It suggests that a diet heavy in carbohydrates leads to weight gain…
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Yesterday I met a fellow type 1 diabetic in a bar. She spotted my libre sensor and showed me hers. We were libre buddies. There the resemblance ended. Her blood sugar was at 15.2 mmol/l (274 mg/dl), and she was drinking a pint of Guinness. When she pulled out her iPhone with the librelink app…
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I’m following a Twitter discussion where the OP asked: What’s the biggest misconception about nutrition that you wish you knew 5-10 years ago? The answers are interesting coming from people who’ve done a lot of research and embarked on diets that differ from the Eatwell plate. The misconceptions include: All calories are equal Whole grain…
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A collaborative project between the University of Gothenburg and the University of Oxford looked at the significance of blood sugar levels in the first years after diagnosis with type 2 diabetes. Scientists found that diabetics benefit from getting control of their blood sugar fast, much more so than we previously thought. Targeting an HbA1c of…
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I read a study the other day that showed that two out of every five Americans who die from covid-19 are diabetic. It makes diabetes one of the highest risk conditions in the pandemic. It’s sobering that while only 10% of the US population suffers from diabetes, 40% of covid-death cases are connected with the…
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While reading an article about the link between diabetes and dementia – which apparently doubles in type 2 diabetics – I came across something interesting in Life’s Simple 7. It’s a list of seven steps that you can take to improve cardiovascular health recommended by the American Heart Association. They sound like a good idea…
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I’m taking a summer course in dystopian fiction. This week we’re reading Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go, which annoys me no end. It presents organ transplants as a route to life extension in a near-future England, where human clones serve as the donors. The problem I have with the novel is that it disregards…
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A recent study from the American Society for Nutrition found no association between eating red meat and the risk of early death, cancer, stroke, or heart disease. The study was quite large, with 134,297 individuals from low-, middle-, and high-income countries participating. In total, there were 7,789 deaths during a nine-and-a-half-year period. While there was…
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